Day July 1, 2007

A few people have asked me what applications I am using on my Mac, in particular all the little sidecar applications I use. When I start using a new application I typically add it to the "app's I use" section of findin.gs. But here is a snapshot of some of the more interesting applications I am currently using.

Omnifocus : Omnifocus is a Getting Things Done (aka, GTD) application that grew out of the work of Ethan Schoonover and the set of scripts that he wrote called Kinkless GTD. I tried Kinkless, moved over to Actiontastic and now I am trialling Ominfocus and loving it. The degree of granularity it offers in terms of project/context control is great – as you flip from project to context, zoom in and out of focus, see Ethan screencast of the product. In Betaworks I have a diverse set of projects that I want to track and manage — Omnifocus is still underdevelopment but the omingroup have the beginnings of a great application here.

Neoffice : Open Office for the Mac, works great, unlike MSFT Office it runs native, and becasue it opens files all inside of one application its far faster than office. I dont generate many office docs, I use Neo essentially as a viewer — works very well. The best of lotus Symphony final comes to life as an open source project.

Spirited away: I like to work with a clean desktop — Spirited Away does just that,it cleans up applications that are not in focus after X minutes, very useful.

Backdrop : Nice little application that drops a curtain between the application in focus and others – for someone who likes working with a clean space, this is a great little app. Spirited away and backdrop work very nicely together.

Mindmanager: Just starting to work with version 7. Its good client based mindmapping software, I am still trying to figure out how to integrate this into my workflow (aka "why do I need this, how does it help")

Groupcal : To synch between exchange and ical, snerdware has a piece of software that runs pretty well. Warning, dont disrupt a synch — recovery is not fun.

Glance : Remote desktop, demo's and presentations, glance is something the Flog team introduced me to and its way simpler than the alternatives (webex etc).

Disk Warrior : I was doing some preventive maintence to the other week and tried to install Tech Tools Pro. In the process my hard drive melted down — half way through the installation I was stuck and off to the Genius bar. Disk Warrior fixed the problem, Tech Tools didnt. For hard disk errors Disk Warrior.